Hollywood's Cold War

Abstract

Published at a point when American filmmakers are deeply involved in the War on Terror, this book offers a comprehensive account of Hollywood's propaganda role during the defining ideological conflict of the twentieth century: the Cold War. In an analysis of films dating from America's first Red Scare in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the book examines the complex relationship between filmmakers, censors, politicians and government propagandists. Movies were at the centre of the Cold War's battle for hearts and minds. Hollywood's comedies, love stories, musicals, thrillers, documentaries and science fiction shockers — to list a few genres — played a critical dual role: on the one hand teaching millions of Americans why communism represented the greatest threat their country had ever faced, and on the other, selling America's liberal-capitalist ideals across the globe. Drawing on declassified government documents, studio archives and filmmakers' private papers, the book reveals the different ways in which cinematic propaganda was produced, disseminated and received by audiences during the Cold War. In the process, it blends subjects as diverse as women's fashions, McCarthyism, drug smuggling, Christianity and American cultural diplomacy in India.

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